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A couple years ago several of the Cant authors got together to write a Call of Cthulhu adventure (1). We laid out some simple ground rules... each person would have a week or so to add five hundred words to the thing, and then mail it off to the next Cant author. We figured that after a month or two we’d have a nice, weighty adventure, filled with all the wackiness that four different hands could pack into it.
It started out great, we got the thing sent around the circle of authors a couple of times… but then it started to slow down. Granted, some people took some extra time to stitch together a bunch of various loose threads of ideas into a solid storyline... but for the most part the writing just slowed, and slowed, and then stalled. Occasionally the next author in the circle would bug the person holding the current script, get them to write and fling. But after a while even that stopped (2). Now fast forward to the final weeks of February and the web comic Iron Man Challenge. The good folks over at the Daily Grind decided to hold a little contest whereby they challenge every "daily" web comic artist to plop down $20 in a bet – produce one new web comic a day. If any artist fails to create a comic by midnight, they forfeit their money. The challenge keeps going on until there’s only one artist left standing, who managed to churn out a new comic every day since the contest started. Given that the Daily Grind got over fifty people to pony up their entry fee, that’s one nice sized prize. It’s brilliant. It’s something the comic authors want to do in the first place, it further carrots them with moola, and further it holds the Damoclean threat of public shame if they fail to produce. Now all we need to do it hook this up for other efforts – think of all the various things that could be produced by groups with that sort of thread. Imagine having an anonymous client that would take a word count of your novel at the end of every day, and compare with the other authors in your writing group. Anyone who didn’t produce five hundred words in their novel every day would be out of the running. Of course, you’d need to make sure that the winner, once one was found, wasn’t just putting "all work and no play makes jack a lazy boy" in every day after dinner... but, it’s a start.
I wonder if I can convince the other Cant authors who started that Call of Cthulhu adventure with me years ago to try this...
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